1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to data storage. In particular, the present invention relates to scalable caching of remote file data in cluster file systems.
2. Background
Information technology (IT) environments require sharing of large amounts of file data in a consistent, efficient, and reliable manner across a wide-area network (WAN). WAN data storage systems, including cluster file systems, need to scale in capacity and bandwidth to support a large number of client nodes. A Cluster comprises a group of interconnected independent computing nodes working together as a single system. A cluster file system manages data stored within a cluster and provides client nodes with access to all files located on storage devices in the file system. A large cluster file system can scale to petabytes of storage and hundreds of gigabytes of access bandwidth, and needs to provide a consistent cache of data that can be exported by a remote cluster file system.